It's not surprising, several Deep Silver plans have fallen through and with the layoffs at Volition this past September, it was only a matter of time before they got bought out.

So that's at least two major AAA releases in the next 12 months? Metro Exodus and probably Dead Island 2 seeing as Sumo Digital will have been developing it for 2 years as of March 2018 + previous years of development by Yager.

Assuming the layoffs at Volition were the Agents of Mayhem team, are we to assume that the majority of the studio are working on the next Saint's Row and it's being released in the next 12 months?

That's the way I've always been. It's somewhat difficult to get into a new game but I'll happily drop back into a game that I've played many times before. My current favs being Saints Row 2/3 and Borderlands 2/TPS along with Plants Vs Zombies being a quick drop in/drop out game where I play a level and then go back to watching TV or something else. There are a number of games that I've started and liked (like Deus Ex MD) but haven't seriously got into as of yet.

The two most game-changing mods in my load order right now hands down are Sim Settlements and Salvage Beacons.

Sim Settlements is what all of the Workshop dlc that Bethesda puked out should have been. Instead of specific placements, it lets you zone out your settlements (residential, agricultural, industrial, etc.) and lets your settlers do the rest of the work. The newest expansion, Rise of the Commonwealth, takes this a step further, and lets you assign a city leader, which automates the whole thing. By level 3 you have a legitimate city popping up that feels like it could have been in the base game. It's fantastic, and is now essential in my load order.

Salvage Beacons is another essential mod, and it is one of those mods that is so simple and obvious it really makes you wonder why it wasn't in the main game. The entire gameplay loop of Fallout 4 is explore-fight-scavenge-make several trips back and forth to bring all your loot home-explore-fight-etc. What salvage beacons does is cut out that terrible "make several trips back and forth" part. You literally load up any container with your loot, stick a beacon in, then select which settlement you want it to go to. A salvage team will be dispatched from the nearest settlement with a station, and they'll bring it to where you want it to go. Such a simple idea, but it cuts out so much tedium, making the gameplay loop tighter and much more enjoyable.

Sounds like it's what I ended up doing when playing FO3/NV. I used the console cheats to set my carry weight to unlimited so anything I ran that I wanted I could just pick it up and move on. No need to worry about heading back and forth between towns.

Sure they would fix it because it was an issue in the press/public discussion. At that point it really didn't matter whether it was an actual technical issue that needed to be addressed. AMD had to do so something that would be seen to address the issue and they did.

It seems like the only reason someone doxxed Ryan Shrout was to the original video where Jim/AdoredTV pointed out some issues with part PCPer's work and then had some speculation on why those things were done. Nothing that justified doxxing anyone or even blowing up at PCPer, but then people on the Internet often over-react.

ZOTAC has decided to host an awesome giveaway for the members of /r/PCMasterRace!

To enter, you must comment/answer (in this thread) any set of questions below:

1) ZOTAC was founded in 2006. We would like to know your thoughts on what ZOTAC means to you. Also, when and how did you first hear about ZOTAC?

2) As the customer, what kind of company would you like ZOTAC to be for you? How can we make welcome you into our ZOTAC hardware family?

3) ZOTAC being the industry leader in Mini PCs, would it be more likely for you to purchase a ZOTAC Mini PC if it were modular/customizable? Why choose a traditional full-tower build opposed to a Mini PC? In your opinion, what are the Pros and Cons?

BONUS (Not a valid entry question): Should pineapple on pizza be illegal?

hmm, to answer the first question I tend to associate ZOTAC with smaller solutions. It seems that Zotac most often is the company coming out with smaller card or other solutions over other companies which may be going for bigger and more powerful solutions.

2) Produce good reliable products at decent prices and the customers will come.

3) For me it's always going to be a full tower in my builds because I want a lot of storage options available and I'm not going for the HTPC. That said a lot of people do want HTPCs so it's a good market to concentrate on.

Pineapple on pizza isn't my favorite but I'm not against it. After all I love pineapple on a baked ham and pepperoni is nothing more than ham and spices in a different form.

Horribly inefficient video files, either using outdated codecs (Bink, etc) or just with really poor encoding settings that result in massively oversized files.

4k+ textures. Honorable mention for id tech games that use megatexturing, which enormously inflates file sizes despite the fact that no developers ever really take advantage of it.

Package management systems that result in redundant copies of files either simply due to the way that the project was organized, or to reduce load times. Can have a terrible cumulative effect with multiple copies of high-res textures.

His first assumption is wrong. It's not that 'abuse is the cost of doing business', it's that 'abuse is the cost of participating in social media.' It doesn't matter if you are a young kid, an old man, a huge company or a game dev. If you spend enough time participating (posting/commenting) in social media you will encounter abuse. Some may be in response to some opinion you said. Some will be completely random.

Being a game dev just gives a reason for people to congregate and comment and yes, post some abusive comments. That said I'm sure you can find the same thing with large companies like Coke and Pepsi. The difference being that you typically won't find employees of those companies posting online as identifiable employees. Those that do will get abuse. You can see it here on Reddit when AMD or Intel employees participate in threads in their related sub-reddits.

It's just part of our zeitgeist now that everyone is free to post their opinion. It's also true that the more opinionated you are the more likely people are to pay attention so an abusive comment will get more attention (good and bad). I'm not sure how (or even if) this can be fixed.

You do, but for any developer with more than a few people working at the company not everyone needs to actively participate in social media. At least not on a regular basis and not as publicly identifiable employee. Designate someone to be the punching bag that will be the public face of the company and let everyone else concentrate on the work. It's not an ideal situation but it's the best I can see available to us today because nothing seems to work at getting rid of the toxicity because there's a constant influx of new people. Most will be good but all it takes is a few bad apples to make developers feel like the world is against them.

His fans were quite vociferous in their support of him. That's part of the problem. These kids so self-identify with people like Logan Paul they can do no wrong in their eyes. In their supporter's eyes they will excuse almost anything they do. Trying to get those supporters to realize that not everything they do is right and should be supported is going to be difficult if not impossible.

That's fine when you are dealing with a classroom mostly full of relatively well adjusted kids. When that isn't the case the kids may get in the way of teaching the curriculum and hence a need to address the other aspects of their lives so the teachers can get back to the curriculum.

Yes, the goal is not to prevent 100% of the cheaters but to get rid of the majority. The cheaters that are obvious and tend to get under people's skins. The smart ones don't appear to be any different from a really good player and so aren't going to be suspected of cheating by other players. Okay, some will but then the same accusations of cheating are made against really good players.

I think writing a private cheat for a thin-client (streamed) game would be exceptionally hard, and that seems to be an inevitable future of videogames due to the advantages (forced deprecation/license cancellation, security, etc.) is affords publishers.

That only works in places where there are no monthly bandwidth limits. That's typically not the case in Canada and the USA and likely other countries with a significant gaming culture. Streamed games eat up bandwidth much like 4K video and so are a real problem for people who have limited bandwidth allotments. I'm limited to a TB a month on Comcast unless I want to pay more. Youtube, gaming, web browsing and other uses can eat up a significant portion of that allotment leaving very little left for streaming a game (and dealing with the latency involved in any streamed game.)

I agree with you, logically, it is a blur of nonsense even with the sub mode on with little chance of anything resembling discussion. It is a completely illogical part of my brain that won't be content when I am barred from commenting without paying. I don't even comment more than once an hour probably, but I for some reason am super bothered when the ability to comment is "taken" from me. The Trihex stream gets me over my mental hurtle though, so I can still enjoy it from there.

It's not just you. I sometimes join in on other channels and when they have subscriber only mode I get irritated even though I may go hours without saying anything in the channel. It's just having someone taking something away that you normally can participate in that seems to hit some primitive part of the brain.

It worked the other way for me. I've been giving NoScript a chance, but after having to go Msft Edge for the second time today to get a web page to work I decided to give Umatrix a shot. It's different from the old Noscript but Umatrix has proved much easier to use than the new Noscript. Now maybe the new Noscript is more powerful (and maybe it isn't) but I'll take something I can get to work over something that keeps getting in the way any day.

I say that after having read over the documentation a few times and spending quite a bit of time trying to get Noscript to work but running in to some web pages where nothing I did with Noscript got it to work. Pages that worked with the old Noscript and worked with Umatrix. I'm not completely giving up on Noscript as I'm willing to try it again in a few months but for now I'm going with Umatrix.

This switch with Firefox has gotten me to move to Bitwarden from LastPass, UBlock from Adblock Plus and Umatrix from Noscript. Changes that I never would have made without the forced changes in FF57.

They do look quite similar and if seen from a distance I don't know that it would be possible to tell them apart. Seen up close like in the above photograph it's much easier to tell them apart. Of course if you are watching them in a show where you can hear them and watch them move and their mannerisms it becomes even easier to tell them apart.

I've never bought an indie game (or a AAA game) because it was indie/AAA. I buy games that interest me. Things that look like fun without objectionable content (lots of semi-force micro-transactions) at a reasonable price. I imagine most people are the same and don't really worry about if a game is indie or not.

I felt like removing the message boards was the first step to IMDB killing itself off. It will go for a long time unless a good competitor comes along but it is slowly but surely becoming a shell of itself as they morph it into something else. Perhaps it's all in an effort to find better ways to monetize the site but if it comes at the cost of losing the users then what have they gained?

Although he also mentioned that there would be a special event. So we might get a Shoutcraft event that isn't Shoutcraft Kings.

Though there's always the question of TB's health. I know he's had some issues with his voice that have kept him from doing the videos that he wanted so while I hope we have one I wouldn't be surprised if there was no Shoutcraft event this month.

Doesn't sound like it given the complaints made about Fortnite and then "I want other developers to put their own spin on the genre... not just lift things from our game," this bi. Taken together I think it's clear that even though most people think Fortnite has put a unique spin on the genre it's clear that Brendan doesn't believe that and is still hoping to get the legal system to protect them.

Played it a bit over the last few days. Half of the time I was kicked out in the first 20 seconds of the actual game. Apparently Fortnite is super sensitive to anything else going on in the background. With any other game I can have a stream running in the background and there's no problem but Fortnite kicks me out if anything else is running (even though I'm on a 100Mbit down/12Mbit up connection.)

That said when the game works it seems a bit fun. Though I expect it's much more fun with a team. A 50 player team might be a bit much. ;)

It's easier if you are part of a team. With at least two people working together one can concentrate on defense while the other builds. Otherwise it seems like you can't build much unless you are well away from the other players to give you time to gather resources and build your base.

Most fan's aren't opposed to female leads, they are simply traditionalist when it comes to the doctor himself.

It's not an unreasonable stance to take. People draw lines all the time with what they consider ok to change about established franchises and what they won't accept as changes.

i don't see it as any different than people taking issue with Lucas introducing midichlorians. he's got every right to do it, and it doesn't completely break or invalidate the story he's telling but it's perfectly ok if, as a fan, you think it's a bullshit change to the "space wizards" you know and love.

Put me in that camp. I'm perfectly happy with female leads in shows/movies that were written for them, but Doctor Who has been male from the beginning and they didn't even really play with the idea of Time Lords changing sex till Missy/Master came along so it's not surprising man people would have expected a new Doctor to be male. As for the whole midichlorian issue I was happy to find out that the Jedi were actually Lensmen. ;)

Exactly! That's why people's complaints in this thread annoy me so much. They're all acting as if Moffatt is attacking progressive values when he's actually been mostly criticized for being too liberal and progressive. I think he just meant that, while those things are important, they aren't the only purpose of the show and other factors went into casting decisions besides "is this progressive".

Which is why he should never make a casting decision to satisfy the demands of fandom because no matter what the decision is there will be some group that is upset by it. Make the decision based on the best actors available (including their salary needs) and what stories Moffat (or whomever) thinks they can build off of this actor's portrayal of the character. If that's a woman then go that way. If it's a talking dog then do that. (K9 lives!) Just make sure that there are good stories that come out of the new actor.

TBH, if Larva can man up and just say "hey we have a miscommunicatoin and I thought I can do that for my fans. I am sorry that it is insulting and not communicated to you properly before hand blah blah blah" LX will probably be fine and ZOTAC will have justification to unban him (though probably think twice about inviting him or at least communicate to him about his style before hand properly)...now it is just shit throwing everywhere.

I think what would have helped is if you had said just that, that you were rooting for Legend to put up a fight. That's something we can all get behind because no matter who you want to see win, it's better if both sides play a great game. Legend just wasn't up to that task on that day. If Legend had been able to put up a better fight none of this would have happened as Larva wouldn't have felt the freedom to try to show off/troll/entertain the viewers(take your pick.)